{"id":1765,"date":"2008-09-18T07:01:04","date_gmt":"2008-09-18T06:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1765"},"modified":"2008-09-18T07:01:04","modified_gmt":"2008-09-18T06:01:04","slug":"the-return-of-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1765","title":{"rendered":"The return of socialism"},"content":{"rendered":"I have been saying for years that the FT was the best left-wing newspaper in Britain: just look at today&#8217;s issue which proclaims the end of Thatcher\/Reagan capitalism. Just as New Labour, built on the rejection of Clause Four (for younger readers, a commitment to nationalise &#8220;the commanding heights of the economy&#8221;) implodes, the <em>Financial Times <\/em>welcomes the nationalisation of the biggest insurance firm in the world, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/0\/e9eb021a-84f5-11dd-b148-0000779fd18c.html\">the leader asks<\/a> whether such measures should not be permanent:<br \/>\n<blockquote> the reach and power of the state has been greatly extended. The Bear Stearns bail-out involved the Fed moving to cover investment banks. With the <span class=\"caps\">AIG <\/span>takeover, it has moved into insurance. In the long run, policymakers must turn their minds to how systemically important institutions should be governed without creating over-powerful regulators, and whether any parts of the financial system might best be kept in the public sector.<\/blockquote>\nExtraordinary to reflect that I have lived long enough to see communism die and then the capitalism that replaced it too; to see the nation state and the empire wither away in Europe, and now to return in Asia, and that I have managed to do this without getting very old at all. ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have been saying for years that the FT was the best left-wing newspaper in Britain: just look at today&#8217;s issue which proclaims the end of Thatcher\/Reagan capitalism. Just as New Labour, built on the rejection of Clause Four (for &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1765\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,9,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1765"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1766,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765\/revisions\/1766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}